The photo for this week’s post represents branding. That may seem strange since three of the posts in today’s Roundup are about social media for writers. The reason I chose this image is to emphasize that we leave footprints of our brand everywhere we travel online.

So what is branding for an author? Brand can be defined as someone’s lasting impression of you. For example, how do you feel when you see a can of Campbell’s soup? If your mother included this brand of soup in your diet as a child, then you may have warm feelings about it. How do you feel when you see a book by Hemingway? You might have a lasting impression of his tight dialogue. How do you feel when you see a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez? You know that you’ll be suspending logic as you enter his world of magical realism as you lose yourself in a small town in Colombia.

What feeling do you want your readers to have about your books? What can they always expect? The answers to those questions determine your brand and what you post on social media will determine your brand.

Top 3 Marketing Mistakes in Social Media Right Now from Business 2 Community: Ever since social media took off, businesses have jumped on the bandwagon to tap the online market. Social media marketing is now a fixture in any online marketing strategy. Originally, it was all about SEO, now it’s about content. Many businesses have learned the value of social media, but not all of them are using it the right way

7 Useful WordPress Twitter Plugins from Search Engine Journal by Nikhil Jain: Love it or hate it, the microblogging service that started back in 2006 has made an undeniable impact not only in the world of social networking, but on the world in general. Who can forget the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, where the site gave hundreds of Egyptians a platform to share the truth of what was going on when nearly all other options had been restricted? Never before had a social media service been used in such a paramount way and it was a huge wake up call about how powerful the site could be: if you want to get a message out quickly and to as many people as possible, Twitter is the way to do it.

5 Hot Tips to Boost Your Social Media Presence from Red Website Design Blog: Making your social channel a lively and vibrant community, isn’t such an easy task. It’s great you read best practices from other brands, but just copying these is not enough to stand out from your competition. Doing good on social media won’t be enough to grow your audience and level of engagement. Let me put it his way: if you play by the rules, ROI won’t be the logical next step.

Facebook explains how 20% text overlay policy for ads is enforced by AllFacebook: “Since Facebook changed its policy to limit text overlay in News Feed ads to no more than 20 percent of an image’s area, many advertisers have been scratching their heads over why some seemingly compliant ads are being rejected and why other text-heavy ads make it through. We spoke to a member of Facebook’s policy team to get a better understanding of how this new rule is enforced and what the company is doing to improve consistency and clarity for advertisers, such as building a public-facing version of the tool it uses internally to review images.”

The power of understatement in fiction writing by @CarmelBird via Jane Friedman: “In popular fiction, and in romantic fiction, for instance, understatement is rarely used. This kind of fiction is often an exercise in overstatement. I will give you an example of overstatement from a romantic novel, and then two examples of understatement. All three pieces of writing are meant to give the reader an image of a man and a woman embracing. The images in the second and third “literary” examples are achieved only in the mind of the reader, whereas in the first one the romantic writer explains things graphically for the reader. Many readers love this kind of writing. How you do things depends on what effect you are aiming for. I generally prefer understatement myself.”

52 Fantastic Twitter Follows for Self-Publishers by Joel Friedlander: “I’ve heard all the reasons. I’ve listened to the excuses. I’ve tried to convince people that “Twitter doesn’t bite.” In fact, the very first blog post I ever wrote was about how to get your feet wet in the Twitter pond. Okay, I’m a Twitter fan. Outside my blog, that’s where I spend time online. Resources, opinions, conversation and community abound. Follow and be followed, it’s out in the open and the sharing can be intense. But one of the things that stops authors from getting into the conversation is: they don’t know who to follow or where to find them. Answer: I’ve done the work for you.”

34 Strategic Ways You Can Use Pinterest to Market Your Book and Your Author Brand by Kimberley Grabas: “Pinterest is exploding! And with it, so too are the opportunities for authors to expand their reach and increase their book promotion and brand awareness. Now the third largest social network, Pinterest acts as a virtual pin board that helps you organize and share things you find on the web. As you surf, you can pin images from other sites onto Pinterest where others can re-pin those same images.”